The CFI funds have enabled us to acquire and integrate a complete line of equipment to investigate the conversion of biomass residue to a transportable and storable commodity.
The CFI funds have enabled us to acquire and integrate a complete line of equipment to investigate the conversion of biomass residue to a transportable and storable commodity. An estimated 150 millions tonnes/year of biomass residues are available in Canada as by-products of agricultural and forestry operations. The non-uniformity of this abundant but dispersed biomass make it unsuitable to produce high yielding bio oil and renewable natural gas in a commercial scale. The challenge is to formulate and preprocess the diverse feedstock to meet the exacting specs required for catalyst longevity. Critical unit operations for feedstock preparation consist of size reduction, fractionation, drying, conditioning, biomass densification, and curing/cooling. With the funding from CFI and our partner industries, we have assembled a state of the art equipment and analytical instruments to convert the diverse agricultural and forestry wastes into uniform size and dry pellets. The associated analytical instruments identify and measure the key quality parameters such as species, size and shape characteristics, angle of repose, bulk density, particle density, moisture content, ash content and elemental analysis including salts. The units are integrated in BRIC’s advanced conversion equipment to serve the biomass industry from raw biomass handling to finished product.
Contact: Dr. Shahab Sokhansanj, Project Lead